An anchor is a device that is attached to a vessel and dropped into the bottom of a body of water to prevent or restrict the vessel or other floating objects from drifting due to wind or current. Anchors typically achieve holding power either by hooking into the bottom or via sheer mass, or a combination of the two. The vessel is attached to the anchor by an anchor line which is made of chain, cable, rope or a combination of these. The earliest anchors were probably rocks. In ancient times, people used basket of stones, and large sacks filled with sand. Such anchors held the vessel merely by their weight and by their friction along the bottom. Iron was afterwards introduced for the construction of anchors, and an improvement was made by forming them with flukes to bury themselves into the bottom.
One of the earliest design and most well known anchors is probably the admiralty or fisherman anchor which consists of a straight bar having at one end a straight crossbar, called the stock, and at the other a pair of curved flukes. Once the anchor lands on the bottom, a pull on the chain will generally tends to cause the fluke to digs into the bottom. The object of the stock is to help ensure the anchor can take up the most favorable position no matter how it is thrown overboard. Many new improvements to anchor design have been introduced since then including the CQR, Claw, Spade, Delta, Danforth, Rocna, etc.
There are several criterion that are necessary for a good anchor: the anchor must have good holding power and work in a variety of bottom conditions, the anchor must be able to set and reset itself quickly, the anchor design must not allow the anchor line to become snagged by the anchor. In addition, it needs to be lightweight enough to be quickly and easily deployed by the user and convenient to store. This last criterion is especially important for smaller recreational boats found in the shallower water of lakes, rivers, and inland waterways.
The traditional anchor types are made in one piece and are generally bulky and heavy making it hard to transport and present a problem for storage. Modern anchor types have been introduced to provide anchors that meet the criterion outlined above. However, none of these anchors provide the novelty of the present invention that introduces an improved detachable boat anchor that provides portability and compact storage in a disassembled state and offers good holding power that is suitable and effective for a variety of bottom conditions